August 31, 2010

For the past 10 years spanish born Victor Carrasco has been in collaboration with many prestigious companies such as Boffi, Glas Italia, Coalesse (Steelcase group), Gandia Blasco, and Hodema. He is the founder and the creative and strategic director of a contemporary furniture company, Viccarbe. He has worked with multiple internationally recognized designers like Patricia Urquiola, Jean-Marie Massaud, Arik Levy, and Jeffrey Bernett.

In 2009 Victor designed the VOL sink for Boffi. The Vol is based on a sculpture by Victor that he wanted to turn in to a sink for his home, he showed it to Boffi and the rest is history. Victor always creates functional pieces with great elegance and strong personality.

For Glas Italia he designed the Trim collection a group of bridge shaped low tables with irregular shapes and special faceted grindings of the glass, in clear or black glass.

Victor is a good friend and fan of ours and on August 10th he visited DZINE and signed the Trim table we have on display.

August 30, 2010

San Francisco's new Mint Plaza is a symbol of urbanity. It is studded with the Old Mint, a venerable 1870s Greek revival stone building with vestiges of its Gold Rush past, and surrounded by frayed single-room- occupancy buildings, elegant cafes, restaurants and chic, revamped live/work lofts in 16-story buildings. That was exactly what attracted a pair of young men from the Peninsula who live amid suburban homogeneity, although one of them works at Google's hip headquarters, to buy a penthouse pied-a-terre on the plaza.

"They wanted something unique, like a nightclub of their own," says Nicole Hollis, the San Francisco interior designer who helped them find their dream loft in a 1920s 10-story steel-and-concrete building. The 2,000-square-foot loft also has a rooftop garden.

Hollis has known the couple since 2005 when she decorated a smaller flat for them in Mountain View and remembered their penchant for glamour and fashion.

"We had to think of Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci and Tom Ford rolled into one," she said.

To unify that vision, Hollis coordinated details with project architect Ian Birchall, lighting consultants at Lumatech (who worked on the San Francisco nightclub Ruby Skye) and landscape design firm Living Green. They created a bespoke two-bedroom home that morphs with push-button speed into a full-fledged nightclub replete with a mist machine, disco ball, video projections and surround sound. The owners can fill it almost as quickly with friends who get invited via text messages.

The bare-bones standard condominium was stripped to its steel and concrete shell and Hollis restored a minimum of partitions to form two bathrooms, a private study and guest room. The slope of a ramped L-shape entryway is now barely discernible. Lightweight walk-through aluminum chain-link curtains and see-through glass walls divide the remaining space.

"We needed some surfaces to project images into the middle of the space and chain link was better than wood or steel-beaded curtains for that," Hollis said.

Guests can dance in the living room under strobe lights (hidden above retractable ceiling panels), swill at the backlit bar that has a cascading fountain as its backdrop, or go up Birchall's showy white Corian staircase to the roof garden.

A Boffi kitchen and modern furnishing from Dzine, a crisp steel storage wall that conceals audio/visual equipment and a flat-screen TV add polished counterpoints to raw concrete left exposed in several areas of the loft.

Because the furniture is deliberately low, the party loft seems larger than it is.

When parties swell to larger numbers, revelers can spread upstairs to the roof deck where Hollis has supplied a stainless steel barbecue and more seating alongside Paola Lenti ottomans on an artificial-turf carpet.

Hollis and project designer Edward Ngiam were not allowed to change any part of the historic shell or add or alter windows. During the day the natural colors of concrete, wood, brick and black lacquer cabinetry make this a relaxed setting to enjoy daylight and south- and west-facing views, but at night, as if to compete with showy sunsets, Hollis used a basic trick: colored lights (a la artist James Turrell) that dim and change from blue to red to pink to create the illusion of sunsets within the mostly white space.

August 23, 2010

On June 29, the permanent exhibition “Sitzkultur: die Geschichte des Sitzens” (Seating culture: the history of the seat) opened, organized at the Lippisches Landesmuseum, Detmold, Germany, with the cooperation of the University of Ostwestfalen-Lippe. The exhibition aims at presenting a heterogeneous furniture collection including about 170 pieces from 1850 to the present, designed by the major designers in the world.

Zanotta is pleased to announce that the Sella seat, designed by Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni in 1957, still in their collection has been selected to participate in this event as an example of timeless design.

August 21, 2010

From afar, Patricia Urquiola's futuristic, L-shaped sofa multi-tiered armchairs could pass for well-engineered layers of fondant or Play-Doh. But, take a closer look, and you'll discover the Milan-based designer took cues from something much more grown-up for her latest Rift collection: geology.

Recalling the stacked, askew tectonic plates of the Great Rift Valley, the 11-piece series for Moroso also includes three Y-shaped islands, low barstools and an outdoor lounge that was just unveiled in Italy.

"The inspiration came from the geological phenomenon of places where the Earth's crust and the lithosphere is being pulled apart," says Urquiola of her sculptural pieces made of spongy polyurethane foam embedded in a steel frame. "I saw this when working on the project and liked the sliding effect on the backrest in relation to the base." The avant-garde furniture isn't entirely designed around science and theory. "I have an image of it in my mind, especially during a party," she adds. "When it's full of people sitting on it, forming a very interesting random human composition."

DZINE

Elegance. Simplicity. Functionality. DZINE represents a philosophy of design that is truly contemporary – one that encompasses not what is merely new, but what is essential and timeless.

A furniture showroom dedicated to the best of European design, DZINE occupies an airy 15,000 sq. ft. in the San Francisco design district. Whitewashed walls and bare concrete floors create a neutral backdrop. The effect is minimal, yet inviting. It is a space that places emphasis on the line, proportion and detail of the furniture itself, reflecting the respect for the integrity of each design and its creator.